I’ve just read Eysenbachand and Till (2001) and it gets worse. Not only has Eden cited a 23 year old paper (which is a 2 page BMJ paper) as their specious justification for not seeking MN permission for data scraping, but Eden has completely misrepresented the whole premise of this paper.
I’ve copied quite a bit to give an indication of the direction of their arguments:
Internet communities' members do not expect to be research subjects
Although publication on the internet may have parallels to publishing a letter in a newspaper or saying something in a public meeting, there are important psychological differences, and people participating in an online discussion group cannot always be assumed to be “seeking public visibility.” On the internet the dichotomy of private and public sometimes may not be appropriate, and communities may lie in between.
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Several measures can be used to estimate the perceived level of privacy. Firstly, if a subscription or some form of registration is required to gain access to a discussion group then most of the subscribers are likely to regard the group as a “private place” in cyberspace.
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Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the perception of privacy depends on an individual group's norms and codes, target audience, and aim, often laid down in the “frequently asked questions” or information files of an internet community.
Such as MN T&Cs?
…it should be considered whether publication of the results (especially when mentioning the group name) may negatively affect group members or harm the community as a whole.
Such as misrepresenting and labelling MN and the entire FWR as transphobes expressing hate crime for which actual humans have been arrested? The authors go on to suggest best practice that includes:
Obtaining permission from the “list owner” (the individual responsible for maintaining the mailing list) or moderator (if any) is rarely adequate… [but they] may know the online community better than the researcher, so they can be a useful starting point to find out what the group norms are and what would be the best way of obtaining informed consent from group members.
As other researchers interested in MN data have done. The short paper concludes (my emphasis):
Privacy and confidentiality
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The internet holds various pitfalls for researchers, who can easily and unintentionally violate the privacy of individuals. For example, by quoting the exact words of a newsgroup participant, a researcher may breach the participant's confidentiality even if the researcher removes any personal information… Participants should therefore always be approached to give their explicit consent to be quoted verbatim...
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Conclusions
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The main problem with using internet communities for research is that researchers may have difficulty separating spaces regarded as private from spaces regarded as public. We recommend that researchers and institutional review boards should carefully consider these points when developing and reviewing research protocols and should involve members of the group they want to study in these considerations...
It is appears to me that Eden (and possibly Nikki) strongly suspected that permission would not be granted but felt FWR and other posters ought to be outed as transphobic to such an extent that, in my opinion, they both have appeared to disregard key ethical and methodological issues in terms of consent. I’d have failed a first year student for misrepresenting their key ethical justification for not seeking permission.
Edited to clarify this is my opinion and conjecture, not fact.